Thursday, July 19, 2007

Transformers

We saw Transformers last night. I have fond memories of the cartoon series. When I reminisce about watching the Transformers as a kid, I remember hanging out at Brandon Smith's house with my brother and other friends watching the show. I always liked the 80s cartoon despite the fact that parts of it were kind of cheesy. For example:

Megatron would turn into a hand gun.

Soundwave would turn into a stereo box.

Optimist Prime's trailer would always conveniently just fade away when we was transforming to humanoid mode. (Brandon would start ragging on the cartoon. He would say something like: "hey where did his trailer go.") If I remember correctly, his trailer would also just mysteriously show back up when he transformed back to a rig.

The movie fixed some of that. Megatron now turns into some kind of jet (which makes much more sense to me than a simple hand gun), Optimist Prime did not have a trailer and Soundwave was not introduced. Some online reviews though allude that the Police car was him or inspired by him or he was turned into a Police car or something.

In the movie, the robots seemed very realistic and scary. The fight scene at the beginning between the rogue helicopter Decepticon and the US military in Iraq; and the followup with that 50 foot long scorpion Decepticon fighting the remnant of US Special Ops fighters left over from the first fight with the helicopter were both awesomely disturbing.

However they could've done a better job developing the Transformer characters. Perhaps they'll do that in the sequels though.

It was really funny to me how the Decepticons (and the Autobots ) hunted down Sam via his ebay user id and auction listing. The Decepticon even quoted to him his auction listing number.

I liked the history that they introduced giving Sam and the Transformers a remote connection through a brief encounter between an ancestor of his and Megatron.

Starscream just didn't look like himself at all. Yeah he was bad and scary, but they should've made him look more like himself. The same for Megatron too. Also in the TV series, Starscream was a good fighter but had a wussy side to him. The wussy side was not shown in the movie.

All-in-all I really like the movie a lot. It freakin rocked! It not only did justice to the cartoon but improved upon it in my opinion.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418279/